(Roughly) Daily

A.I. pioneer Dario Amodei with a positive scenario for artificial intelligence…

I think and talk a lot about the risks of powerful AI. The company I’m the CEO of, Anthropic, does a lot of research on how to reduce these risks. Because of this, people sometimes draw the conclusion that I’m a pessimist or “doomer” who thinks AI will be mostly bad or dangerous. I don’t think that at all. In fact, one of my main reasons for focusing on risks is that they’re the only thing standing between us and what I see as a fundamentally positive future. I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be.

In this essay I try to sketch out what that upside might look like—what a world with powerful AI might look like if everything goes right. Of course no one can know the future with any certainty or precision, and the effects of powerful AI are likely to be even more unpredictable than past technological changes, so all of this is unavoidably going to consist of guesses. But I am aiming for at least educated and useful guesses, which capture the flavor of what will happen even if most details end up being wrong. I’m including lots of details mainly because I think a concrete vision does more to advance discussion than a highly hedged and abstract one…

How AI could transform the world for the better: “Machines of Loving Grace,” from @DarioAmodei. Eminently worth reading in full…

A (similarly positive, but slightly more focused) piece from a team at Deepmind: “AI for Science.”

Apposite (if not opposite): “Shoggoths amongst us,” from Henry Farrell, and an earlier (R)D, “We ceased to be the lunatic fringe. We’re now the lunatic core.”

See also: “AI Isn’t Your God—But It Might Be Your Intern.”

* Richard Brautigan, “All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace” (the source of Amodei’s title)

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As we ponder the perplexities of progress, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Grace Brewster Murray Hopper; she was born on this date in 19o6.  A seminal computer scientist and Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy, “Amazing Grace” (as she was known to many in her field) was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer (in 1944), invented the first compiler for a computer programming language, and was one of the leaders in popularizing the concept of machine-independent programming languages– which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages.

Hopper also (inadvertently) contributed one of the most ubiquitous metaphors in computer science: she found and documented the first computer “bug” (in 1947).

She has both a ship (the guided-missile destroyer USS Hopper) and a super-computer (the Cray XE6 “Hopper” at NERSC) named in her honor.

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